Tag: Civil Society

Jan 1, 2012: The hubbub of political power in India, or its predecessor entities, has seldom existed unaccompanied by the corrective — and often contrary — decibel of the moral voice. Rajas had their rishis, the sultans their sufis, even the merchant-kings of Europe came informed by more than just the motive of profit; they had the Church and contentious burdens of the White Man.

Kejriwal: Rishi? Raja?

Elected Prime Ministers have civil society. Under the current one, the moral voice is an entity called the National Advisory Council, institutionalised under the tutelage of Sonia Gandhi, dowager-regent of the UPA. It could well be that such co-option of civil society created a counterblast whose implications we are probably yet to fully understand.

When the Anna Hazare-Arvind Kejriwal duo raised their standard of reform two years ago they grabbed the nation’s eyeballs and the Establishment’s neck. It was a stir that led many — from callow idealists to disruptive town criers — to mistake it as India’s Tahrir Square, a burgeoning bivouac that would close siege on the institutions of state and eventually impose on them a new Magna Carta of “people’s power” whose central edict would be the “Jan Lokpal”. Continue reading “2012: The Big Crossover Bid–From Rishi to Raja”→

New Delhi, Dec. 29: Well before the candles were lit this evening, the one at the centre of it all had been blown. Jantar Mantar was aglow with the light of the extinguished one — a suffering life that had stopped to struggle in the dead of night and given on to a morning of outcry and crying, condoling and condemnation.

Well before the Singapore hospital gurney was cleared of the remains of a feast of cannibal lust, well before she returned home for her final journey, her tragedy had been robbed the courtesies of silence, her wake abducted to a raucous stage of bickering over who’s to pay. Continue reading “The Violence of the Lambs”→